IX.  That, on complaint of those proceedings, the said Hastings did of his own authority, and without communicating with his Council, direct the native collector aforesaid to be removed, and the territory of Furruckabad to be left to the sole management of its natural prince.  But in a short time the said Hastings, pretending to receive many complaints purporting that the tribute to the Nabob remained wholly unpaid, and the agent to the prince of Furruckabad at the Presidency, and afterwards chief manager to the prince aforesaid, having, as the said Warren Hastings saith, “had the insolence to propagate a report that the interference to which his master owed the power he then enjoyed was purchased through him,” he, the said Hastings, did again (but, as before, without the Council) “withdraw his protection and interference altogether,” on or about the month of August, 1782, and did signify his resolution, through the Resident, Middleton, to the Nabob Vizier.  But the said Hastings asserts that “the consequence of this his own second dereliction of the prince of Furruckabad was an aggravated renewal of the severities exercised against his government, and the reappointment of a sezauwil, with powers delegated or assumed, to the utter extinction of the rights of Muzuffer Jung, and actually depriving him of the means of subsistence.”  And the said Hastings did receive, on the 16th of February, 1783, from the prince aforesaid, a bitter complaint of the same to the following tenor.

“The miseries which have fallen upon my country, and the poverty and distress which have been heaped upon me by the reappointment of the sezauwil, are such, that a relation of them would, I am convinced, excite the strongest feelings of compassion in your breast.  But it is impossible to relate them:  on one side, my country ruined and uncultivated to a degree of desolation which exceeds all description; on the other, my domestic concerns and connections involved in such a state of distress and horror, that even the relations, the children, and the wives of my father are starving in want of daily bread, and are on the point of flying voluntary exiles from their country and from each other.”

But although the said Hastings did, on the 16th of February, receive and admit the justice of the said complaint, and did not deny the urgent necessity of redress, the said letter containing the following sentence, “If there should be any delay in your acceptance of this proposal, my existence and the existence of my family will become difficult and doubtful,”—­and although he did admit the interference to be the more urgently demanded, “as the services of the English troops have been added to enforce the authority of the sezauwil,”—­and although he admits also, that, even before that time, similar complaints and applications had been made,—­yet he did withhold the said letter of complaint, a minute of which he asserts he had, at or about that time,